7 Myths CMOs (and Their Bosses) Gotta Stop Buying

Myth #3 - "If we can just get some of that marketing automation, that'll solve our problems." Companies seem to operate in one of two extremes. The younger, scrappier company (or the older company that has never taken marketing very seriously) may invest very little in technology to support marketing staff. The cost is poor resource utilization and lost opportunity. On the other side of the fence is the tech-savvy company that treats automation as the panacea to all of its marketing department ills. It's hard to say which extreme is worse. But from a risk and hard cost standpoint, companies that make poor investments in automation are more exposed. Marketing automation is just a tool. If you have to change your entire company to run the tool, you've made the wrong investment. Your people will revolt. And your technology investment will be largely wasted. Marketing automation should help you to run your company, not the other way around.

Myth #4 - "If we can't quantity it, we shouldn't do it." As a marketing operations advocate, I love measurement. I'm titillated by analytics, especially predictive. I dream about a culture of accountability in every organization. Still I know from experience that a fixation on numbers alone, while appealing to the scientists among us, doesn't begin to capture the breadth of insight we need to make a real informed decision. Much of what we achieve in marketing is extremely difficult (and costly) to quantify. What is the value of a key customer or strategic relationship? To what degree does our brand recognition get us on the short list for our sales opportunities? We may be able to create formulas or models to quantify these assets, but at what cost? If the cost of measuring your marketing begins to approach the cost of your marketing, something is definitely wrong.

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